Tag Archives: Ellis Team at Keller Williams Fort Myers & The Islands

Buyers and sellers always ask how the market is doing, and the answer depends on which agents you’re talking to. It’s easy to conflate how the market is doing with how your personal sales numbers are doing for the month. While it is human nature, it is often a mistake. Southwest Florida inventory rises in April as sales decline.

When an agent’s sales numbers are up the agent feels great and wants to shout from the mountain top how great the market is doing. When an agent’s numbers are down it must be the market. Both cases reflect the attitude of the agent not the actual market statistics.

Buyers and sellers don’t care about that stuff. They want to know how the market is doing. They want it local. Hearing how an agent’s numbers are up when the market is down is about like saying the national housing market is up, but our local market is in the tank. They only care about one thing, and that is the local data.

In SW Florida, single family inventory rose 4.6% in April. This isn’t because a bunch of new listings hit the market. New listings were down 10.1%, so it must be that less homes sold in April. We didn’t draw down as much inventory through sales as we’d hoped. There are two ways to draw down inventory. Sales or expired listings. If an expired listing re-lists, then even that isn’t drawing down inventory.

When we study closed sales in April we find that it did indeed drop. Closed sales fell 2.5%. One month isn’t anything to get worked up about, so we look at new pending sales and total pending inventory to get a clue as to what future months might bring.

New pending sales fell 5.1% in April which could be a warning sign for May and June. Total pending inventory fell 10.1% in April. So, what’s the takeaway from all this data? Is this bad news for the local real estate market?

It simply means pricing and marketing are critical. Prices have held steady but sales are declining. Total dollar volume of sales was down 1.6%. All in all this is a pretty steady market and nothing to be alarmed about.

Southwest Florida Inventory Rises

This is not the market to over-price a home. The SW Florida real estate market is steady and stable. You might call it healthy and balanced. Over-priced sellers will probably be disappointed. Sometimes even proper priced homes get lost in the shuffle as new inventory is added every day. Therefore, we say marketing is critical too. You don’t want to give your home away.

Reducing your home far enough will always guarantee a sale. Once a home is at or below market value the market will scoop it up. The real estate market isn’t as efficient as the stock market. You can’t just look up on the big board and see the price, its P/E ratio, and all the other data available on the stock market. This is why some homes will sell below market value.

Upfront proper pricing helps prevent this. Marketing exposes homes so they don’t have to sell below market. Advertising and marketing smooths out the inefficiencies of the real estate market. Marketing exposes your home to more buyers, thereby guaranteeing a better sales price. In the absence of a big board, marketing is key. We’ll do a future article on this topic soon.